Lea Verou's CV

Highlights

Since 2011, I have designed dozens of web technologies and drove them to ship across major browsers.
My experience in API & product design has been recognized by my repeated election to the W3C TAG, the body responsible for conducting design reviews of proposed web technologies and authoring the design principles of the Web platform.
I have co-created my own UI design course at MIT, and taught it for four years, recently adopted as a permanent subject.
Since 2009, I have created & shipped over 30 tools for web developers. My work is used on several high profile websites, and my open source tools total close to two billion npm downloads.
I have written a bestselling book on CSS translated into 8 languages and dubbed “the best CSS book”.
I have given over 100 invited talks and keynotes at international web development conferences
My consulting portfolio includes clients like Google, Mozilla, Stripe, and McKinsey & Company.
I have co-founded a startup in my home country and grew its user base to 0.75% of the country’s population.
I’m currently wrapping up a Computer Science PhD at MIT. My research is at the intersection of usability (HCI) and language design and has resulted in several publications at top-tier peer-reviewed HCI venues.

Professional experience

Industry

2021–

Elected member • W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG)

The TAG oversees the technical direction of the Web. It consists of inventor of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, and 10 other seats. TAG review is required for shipping in Google Chrome. and for a W3C specification to reach Recommendation status.

100+ design reviews of web platform proposals, focused on user needs & API design.
Created a “fast track” design review process that reduces response time by 88%.
Led successful effort to increase visibility and time allocation for Design Principles.
Proposed & led a Design Principles for Developers publication (ongoing).
Improved collaboration with TC39 and acted as the TAG ↔ TC39 (JS WG) liaison. TC39 is the group that designs JS, the world’s most popular programming language.
My work in the TAG is sponsored by the OpenJS Foundation

2012–

Invited Expert • CSS Working Group

The CSS WG designs the CSS language, used on every website worldwide.

Proposed over 5 CSS features and led them to wide implementation across browsers, including conic gradients, :where(), relative colors, and others .
Led the effort to significantly simplify CSS Nesting syntax, by driving consensus through strategic intermediate milestones.
Driving force behind expanding CSS to wide gamut colors, through a combination of spec work, consensus building, dev evangelism, and open source code.

2012–2013

Developer Advocate • W3C

Improved developer understanding of the standards process, conveyed input to W3C.
Co-organized W3Conf 2013, achieving +70% profit over the previous iteration.

2011–

Founder • Lea Verou Consulting

Speaking, writing, open web standards, usability, product.

Notable clients: Google, Stripe, O’Reilly Media, Wix, Mozilla, McKinsey & Company, Discourse.

2005–2011

Co-founder, CEO • Fresset Ltd

Online communities startup. €80k friends & family round in 2008, exit in 2013

e-steki.gr (0→1): a safe space for sensitive discussions (2005 - Present). User base of 80K users (0.75% of the country’s population). ~500k visits and ~2.5M pageviews/month.
MyCat.gr (0→1): curated reviews of cat products & community of cat owners (2006 - 2022). Created a new, now saturated, market in the country and is still cited as pioneering for its time.
Oversaw two acquisitions: (a) iSchool.gr (first Greek school student community, 25k users) (b) One Night Chat (Innovative web-based talk show, ~80k views/episode)
Strategic partnership with ANT1 (major Greek TV channel)
Managed a small team of developers & designers, and a team of >30 moderators.

2005–2008

Freelance web & graphic designer and full-stack web developer

Academic

Spring 2024

Teaching Assistant • Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Created a series of 10 labs from scratch for MIT’s Interactive Visualization & Society course, teaching students with no programming experience to create rich interactive data visualizations.

Spring 2023 Spring 2022 Spring 2020 Spring 2018

Instructor • Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Co-designed and co-taught Design for the Web: Languages and User Interfaces 3x. ~50 students & listeners. Course numbers: 6.S082, 6.S063, 6.4500 (permanent).
Co-taught “User Interface Design & Implementation” a mature undergrad/grad course of ~250 students (6.813/6.831).
Co-managed teams of 4-9 TAs/LAs.

2014–2024

(minus teaching appointments)

Research Assistant • Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

My research lowers barriers for programming Web applications and empowers novices to create web applications tailored to their needs, and has resulted in several peer-reviewed publications at top-tier conferences.

Designed Mavo, a novel HTML-based programming language that dramatically lowers the technical barrier of developing full-stack web applications.
Designed Lifesheets, a novel no-code tool for making apps for personal tracking.
Supervised 10+ undergraduate and 3 graduate students.

2010–2012

Teaching Assistant • Athens University of Economics & Business

Co-developed a “Web Technologies & Programming” 4th year undergraduate course from scratch, taught all labs, guest lectured part of it.

Publications

Books

CSS Secrets, O’Reilly Media, 2015
- Translated into 8 languages (German, Polish, Russian, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean, Bulgarian)
- Sold 25K copies
- Endorsements:
  - “Best CSS book” by the Chicago Tribune.
  - “Best of the Best” by BestReviews (used by Amazon Recommendations).
  - Average of 4.6/5 on Amazon, 250+ reviews.
  - Consistently in the top 10 Amazon bestsellers on CSS and the top 30 on User Experience & Usability in 2015-2016
  - 1000+ endorsements by readers on Twitter.
Chapter in Smashing Book #3 (with David Storey): “Restyle, Recode, Reimagine With CSS3”, 2012

Web Specs

Designed dozens of web technologies and drove them to wide implementation across all major browsers since 2011. For more details, please refer to the “Specs” section on my website.
Co-editor of the W3C’s Web Platform Design Principles, a document that outlines API design and architectural principles across all Web technlogies. It is used as a reference by Working Groups inside and outside W3C.
Co-editor of several W3C specifications on CSS and related APIs. CSS is a language used by nearly every website in the world.

Peer-reviewed Research Papers

I have published several peer-reviewed research papers, in top-tier HCI venues, such as ACM UIST and ACM CSCW.

A few notable ones are:

Lea Verou, Tarfah Alrashed, David Karger. Extending a Reactive Expression Language with Data Update Actions for End-User Application Authoring. In Proceedings of the ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium (UIST 2018). Berlin, Germany. Oct 2018.
Amy X. Zhang, Lea Verou, David Karger. Wikum: Bridging Discussion Forums and Wikis Using Recursive Summarization. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2017). Portland, Oregon. Feb 2017.
Lea Verou, Amy X. Zhang, David Karger. Mavo: Creating Interactive Data-Driven Web Applications by Authoring HTML. In Proceedings of the ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium (UIST 2016). Tokyo, Japan. Oct 2016.

A full list is available on my website.

Articles

I have written articles for some of the biggest Web development industry media, including A List Apart, Smashing Magazine, .net magazine. You can find an (infrequently updated) list on my website.

Selected Open Source Projects

June 2022

Color.js: Color science based conversion & manipulation library (co-developed with Chris Lilley)

Used as a dependency by several high-impact projects. >2.5 M npm downloads.

May 2017

Mavo: Create complex, reactive, persistent web applications by just writing HTML & CSS, without a single line of JavaScript and no server backend.

My research at MIT. Two peer-reviewed studies indicating that it does indeed help novices develop complex applications. Over 2.5K stars on Github.

Feb 2015

Awesomplete: Lightweight, simple, ultra extensible autocomplete

6.9K stars on Github. >6 M downloads on npm. Featured on Github’s weekly Github Explore newsletter.

Oct 2012

contrast-ratio.com: Color contrast calculator

This has since become one of the most popular contrast checkers, and has been featured in numerous books. Exit to Siege Media in 2023.

Jul 2012

Prism: A beautiful, extensible syntax highlighter

Over 8+ M weekly npm downloads and >1.3 Bn total. Used in prominent apps & websites like Coda Mozilla Developer Network, Google’s web.dev, Sitepoint, Smashing Magazine, A List Apart, CSS Tricks and many others. Over 10K Github stars

Feb 2012

The CSS3 Test: High coverage testsuite for the most stable CSS3 modules.

50,000 unique visitors on its launch. Motivated browser vendors such as Mozilla or WebKit to support more CSS features to increase their scores on it.

Dec 2011

dabblet: An interactive CSS playground that saves to Github gists.

Several popular industry media like Wired.com’s WebMonkey, CSS-Tricks, Smashing Magazine and others wrote about Dabblet’s release. During its first month, it received more than 65,000 unique visitors, 15,000 of which during its first two days.

Sep 2011

cubic-bezier.com: Direct manipulation of bezier-based easing functions

Featured in numerous books. Code from it was included in Firefox, and Adobe’s Brackets editor.

Apr 2011

CSS3 Patterns Gallery: Using CSS3 to generate background patterns

My CSS patterns gallery was featured in Smashing Magazine multiple times and mentioned in conference talks and several books by a number of industry leaders. It was used by Opera Software to fine-tune their CSS gradients implementation.

A lot more of my open source work can be found in my Github profile.

Lea Verou

Highlights

Professional experience

Industry

Academic

Education

Publications

Books

Web Specs

Peer-reviewed Research Papers

Articles

Speaking

Industry recognition

Judging & Reviewing

Industry

Academic

Conference organizing

Selected Open Source Projects

Academic distinctions

Technical skills

Languages

Professional interests

Research interests